Sprint wanted to get in on the Galaxy Nexus hype early with an announcement at CES 2012 in January. At the time, the carrier hadn’t even made plans for its LTE network public, and all it said about the device was that is was coming later in the year. Here we are months later, and Sprint has finally made known its plans to sell the Galaxy Nexus next week.

Sprint will be selling the Galaxy Nexus on Sunday, April 22, but pre-orders are open now. The Verizon Nexus costs $300 on a 2-year contract, but Sprint has chopped the price down to just $200. Physically, this device should be identical to the Verizon version, which is also LTE.

Perhaps that charitable price drop is a tacit admission by Sprint that its LTE network will still be coming online when the phone is released. The overwhelming majority of buyers will be stuck on 3G until later in the year. The Galaxy Nexus won’t have access to Sprint’s deprecated WiMAX 4 network due to hardware limitations, either.

To sweeten the deal even further, Sprint has teamed up with Google to get an even better deal for users of Google Wallet. The contactless NFC payment service already offers $10 of free Wallet money on a pre-paid card to new users, but Galaxy Nexus users will get an extra $40. The only catch is that the promotion runs through May 22, and you have to activate Google Wallet within 7 days of buying the phone. However, other carriers are backing a competing standard called Isis. You might want to spend that free money quickly.

The Galaxy Nexus on Verizon received mostly positive reviews. The Sprint version will have identical hardware including a Ti OMAP 4460 dual-core chip at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 720p Super AMOLED screen, NFC, and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.